As a television professional who
spends most of his time dealing at the very end of an often
lengthy, exhausting, all-encompassing process known as documentary
film-making I’m often asked, “What could I have done to
make my film look more... filmic?”

The First Law of Filmmaking tends to read along the lines of: Know
Thy Camera

Eric Escobar’s excellent blog has a recent post that deals with this issue. He shoots
the same image with two different cameras. One camera is the HV20
shooting with a 4:2:0 codec the other is the EX1 shooting at
it’s highest quality at 4:2:2 with a lens adaptor.

Now - I don’t care at what frame rate you shoot, the EX1 is
far more filmic. Yes? Will 24p make the HV20 feel any more
cinematic? No way Josť.

Eric is onto something here... Know Thy Camera.

He mentions that he had trouble with the HV20, fighting all the
auto controls of this consumer-oriented camera. Whereas on the EX1
he was able to get the exposure he wanted. This, I think, gets to
the crux of the problem. And it’s a problem that I was
reminded of recently re-reading the terrific book
“Professional Photoshop” (the link is in the sidebar on
the right). It’s the issue of Highlights vs Significant
Highlights.

Go back to Eric’s post and look at those two shots again.
To my eyes the biggest difference (besides depth of field) is
exposure. On the auto settings the HV20 sees the brake-lights of
the cars and the bright patch of light of the sky and thinks,
“Gee, those are the highlights. I must protect for those
highlights.” The camera ignores that this is a generally
low-key image and acts as if the most important part of the image
is the sky. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Eric, using his eye and experience, knows better than the auto-iris
and sets up the EX1 much differently. Although he says he’s
protected his highlights, he’s actually let his highlights
blow out in the blur of a short depth-of-field and selective focus.
He’s made the choice that the highlights of the sky and car
lights are insignificant and instead chosen the significant
highlight in the woman’s face. And he exposed
accordingly.

The HV20 has the truly important part of the image, the
woman’s face, completely compressed into a narrow range - as
seen here in FCP’s waveform. In post, when we dig out that
detail we’ll be pulling up noise and degrading the entire
image. In that process we’ll let those highlights blow out
because... who cares??? We want to see the babe!

And this takes me to a discussion I had recently with a colorist
friend of mine who opined that he’s tired of the
“protect your highlights” mantra. I tend to agree with
him. We’ve both recently seen too many filmmakers walk in our
rooms with footage that protects for the sky out the window and
buries the truly significant detail - like human faces - into the
bottom 30% of the waveform. No, not even Red can completely save
you.

As Dan Margulis says in his book, there’s highlights and there’s
significant highlights. Based on what I see coming through my doors
I say filmmakers need to make sure they protect for the Significant
Highlights and let the rest blow out. Especially on a camera like
the HV20 where it’s far more damaging to try and dig out an
underexposed face than to let a window blow out to white.

After
finding myself with some extra time on my hands - I decided to
finally finish (actually - start) Fini’s color correction
demo reel. You can find ithere.

There are two types of demo reels for color correction. The
traditional reel is a series of beauty shots. The less traditional
reel is the Before / After reel.

I spoke to a few producers with lots of experience hiring film
colorists. To a person they said the traditional reel was what I
should produce. They felt that a Before / After reel was the sign
of an inexperienced colorist. I thought about this long and hard...
I decided to go against this advice. My clients aren’t their
clients. I was talking to the wrong people.

Unlike clients buying $600 / hour telecine suites, my clients
don’t have experience sitting with a Color’ist. At best
they’ve worked with a good Avid Symphony online editor who
does a good job but rarely approaches it as a career specialty. At
worst, my clients don’t quite get it; after all, except for a
few tweaks the footage already looks good.Right????

So - unlike a film colorist, I have a ton of educating I need to do
with my clients. The Before / After Reel is a tool designed for
that job. In fact, I’ve already had one producer say to me,
“Perfect - my client has been having a hard time
understanding the need for color correction. This reel explains it
clearly.”

And before you ask/complain, the music is temporary. A friend is
scoring to it.

NEWS
FLASH: Fini is auctioning (3) 10-hour days on January 15, 2009 in
New York City! The proceeds will go to Mopictive, an educational
501(c)3 serving New York City filmmakers. Details on the Fini
auction can be foundhere.
Mopictive's website ishere. Up-to-date
information on all the Silent Auction itemshere.

Or rather, we’ll be auctioning off our color
correction services to the highest bidder in a Silent
Auction.

That’s right. We don’t care if it’s a short, your
20 minute student film, or your 120 minute feature going to the
silver screen - if it’s ready to go by the end of March,
we’ll color correct it!

Of course, there will be limitations (don’t bother trying to
pull Artistic Creativity on us and take 3 weeks to work on one
scene) - those details will be announced soon enough.

The silent auction will take place at the January meeting of
Moptictive (the
New York Final Cut Users Group). I’m their Treasurer and
we’re a great 501c3 educational non-profit. We have big plans
next year. We haven’t named this promotion yet but
it’ll hopefully be the headlining auction of dozens of great
products and services.

Feel free to pass around the news. Sometime before Christmas
I’ll be putting up a web page with full details, including
all the niggly restrictions and required workflow.

In the meantime, Happy Turkey Day!

One programming note: Yes, 5 months, no posts. Let’s just say
it’s been busy around here... and this blog is undergoing
some changes to better align with my needs. Mostly, it’ll
spend less time talking to my peers and more time talking to my
clients. But there’s some good stuff buried in these pages,
so I’m just going to let this puppy lie. But beyond one or
two more posts - this iteration of The Finishing Line will be going
dormant.

And I’ll be posting at least once more before putting
Finishing Line 1.0 to rest.

Last Call! The 1-Day Color workshop
I’m leading is happening tomorrow. In Manhattan. 2 seats are
open. Registration closes early this evening. To sign up directly,
go here.
Below I’m re-posting full details that went up on this blog a
few weeks ago.

Full Disclosure: I am on the Board and Treasurer
of Moving Pictures Collective (Mopictive is a DBA of the New York
Final Cut Users Group and also a certified 501c3 not-for-profit)
which is hosting the following event. You can be assured that over
50% of the proceeds will go to Mopicitive and furthering its
mission to the training of Digital Storytellers. The instructors
(including me) are paid only a nominal fee.

These will be jam packed days. I last did this class several times
last year and they were pretty well received. Jamie and I cover the
basics of color theory, FCP -> Color workflow, the Color
interface, and solving real-world problems on real-world footage.
In July Alexis presents his own material, picking up where I leave
off. He'll cover the ColorFX Room, advanced grading techniques in
the secondaries, and how to get Color's tracker to work properly.
Both of us will leave time to make sure you get your questions
answered.

The best thing about all of these classes - every enrollee will
have access to their own computer running Color. These are hands-on
classes designed to get you feeling comfortable on the software and
giving you a strategy for sculpting your own images.

Cost: $300 / class with 50% of the proceeds going
to Mopictive (the NY Final Cut Pro User Group) and the remaining
split between the facility providing the equipment and the
instructors.

Sign-up: To sign up directly, go here. For more info on the June workshop, go here. And for more info on the July workshop, go
here.

The last 3 weeks (and for the next month) I’ve had the
opportunity to work on JL
Cooper’s MCS- series of hardware controllers. Last week I
posted on the Color-L mailing list that the customization software
for the Spectrum colorist control surface basically... well, sucks.
It’s buggy and it doesn’t have half the controls that
the Eclipse software has. I was very disappointed. My buddy Mitch
responded that he was told at NAB the Eclipse software would drive
those panels.

The thought hadn’t occured to me. On Monday I installed the
Eclipse software (instructions
here) and it worked. I imported my keyset and that worked as
well! Joy, oh happy day.

One small tweak had to be made since the Eclipse does have one
extra button that the Spectrum doesn’t.

So Spectrum users - get out there and behold the power of a fully
functioning control surface. I promise, you won’t be
disappointed!